


Convenience

by The_Lake_King



Series: 2021 Valentine's Prompts [4]
Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Bisexuality, Feelings Realization, Friends With Benefits, M/M, doing things backwards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-15 16:00:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29191941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Lake_King/pseuds/The_Lake_King
Summary: Prompt 4. "Stay here and don't move. I'll be right back."Jimmy makes an arrangement with Thomas.
Relationships: Thomas Barrow/Jimmy Kent
Series: 2021 Valentine's Prompts [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2137182
Comments: 11
Kudos: 48
Collections: Well I love you: Valentines for Thomas Barrow





	Convenience

It started, as Jimmy’s best and worst ideas tended to do, when they were drunk. It was because Jimmy hadn’t gotten his end away in far too long, that was all. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the way Thomas looked in the lamplight, his hair breaking free of its pomade and a delicate pink band across his nose.

“Have you ever been with a girl?” Jimmy asked. They were sitting on Thomas’ bed, a forgotten game of rummy between them.

Thomas took a long swig of whiskey. “Once,” he said carefully. “Why?”

“How’s it different?”

“What d’you mean?”

“Well bein’ with a girl is one way, right? And bein’ with a man’s another. Must be, or you wouldn’t—y’know.” Jimmy blushed. “So how’s it different? The actual sex part, I mean.” God, he sounded like an idiot. But he needed to know.

Thomas frowned for what Jimmy deemed to be an unreasonable length of time before he spoke. “The sex itself isn’t really all that different. It’s sort of…everything around it, I s’pose.” Thomas paused, rolling the neck of the bottle between his fingers. “Put it this way: your hand’s your hand, right? But if the dowager walked into your room starkers while you were tryin’ to take care of yourself, you’d probably find your hand weren’t that good for it anymore.”

Jimmy grimaced.

“Unless you like that kind of thing,” Thomas smirked.

“Oi!” Jimmy leaned over and punched him idly in the shoulder. It made warmth seep into his belly that they could talk openly like this. It was so hard-won, so gratifying to have this level of comfort with each other. And why shouldn’t they? They were best mates. Nothing was off-limits. “So it felt good, when you did it with the girl? If we’re just talkin’ about the sex?”

“Erm, yes. In a way. Why are you harpin’ on about this?”

“I have a proposition.”

Thomas raised his eyebrows. “Go on.”

“I haven’t gotten any in a bloody long time. Have you?”

“No.” Thomas squirmed.

“And you want me, right?”

Thomas gaped at him. Jimmy had been expecting him to blush, but he didn’t. Instead all the colour drained from his face, leaving marble cheeks and paper lips.

“Right?” Jimmy pressed. He chalked the sudden tightness in his chest up to drinking too much and sympathy over how green-around-the-gills Thomas was looking.

“You can’t be suggesting what I think you’re suggesting.”

“Why not? We’re mates, we get off with each other until somethin’ better comes along. What’s the problem?”

Thomas blinked at him for a long moment. “Your attitude about it’s bloody changed, hasn’t it?”

“Look, I said I was sorry about all that. And I had every right to be upset then, you said so yourself. But this is different. We’re mates now, and we’re both decidin’ about it. And I’m not about to take it up the arse, so don’t get _that_ idea.”

“God forbid I get _ideas_ when you’ve just suggested we fuck.”

Jimmy shivered at the obscenity. Thomas saying it like _that_ leant a different quality to the whole thing somehow. Sweat beaded between his shoulder blades. Must be the alcohol.

“I don’t think this is for you, Jimmy.” Thomas licked his lips. Jimmy knew that look, understood the hunger. He knew he had won.

Jimmy jutted his chin out. “Kiss me, then. Go on.”

Thomas just stared at him. With his stupid eyebrows and his stupid loose lock of hair and his stupid, stupid mouth. So Jimmy took the initiative and leaned in.

It was different. Girls didn’t have square jaws covered in stubble, or strong hands that came up to cradle the base of his skull. Girls didn’t taste like whiskey and cigarettes, or have clever tongues that pressed for entrance and licked into his mouth like he was a delicacy. They certainly wouldn’t manhandle him onto their laps and grind their cocks against his.

His skin was far too hot. He wriggled out of his undershirt and threw it on the floor, reveling momentarily in the way Thomas’ eyes raked over his chest. Soon they were both naked and writhing together, Thomas’ hand working between them until Jimmy collapsed, toes curling in ecstasy and his face pressed into Thomas’ lovely, hairy chest. It was perfect. Just pleasure, no simpering or courting or worrying about a potential bastard, just uncomplicated enjoyment of another person’s body and his own. And if he felt a pang when he slid into his own cold sheets at some ungodly hour, still sweaty and smelling of another man, that was just a body’s natural response.

Jimmy wasn’t a homosexual. That much he knew. He was a proper, red-blooded man. A proper, red-blooded man who had certain urges. Most of the women around kept themselves shut tighter than a miser’s purse, and those that didn’t cost money and were far away. They weren’t accessible to a footman with needs. Thomas was accessible. Convenient, even. And he was _good_ at it, better than some blushing maiden could ever be. Better than any disinterested whore. So Jimmy had done as so many men before him with limited options, and turned to a member of his own sex for relief. It was a convenience, nothing more.

It became a habit. It was easy, really, just an addendum to what they did already. They still drank and played cards and spent their half-days together, just now there was the promise of transcendent pleasure to go along with it. If Thomas still got soppy about the whole thing sometimes, or veered dangerously close to introducing words beginning with ‘L’, it was a small price to pay for the delicious feeling of his hands, his mouth, and more recently, blessedly, his arse. And if Jimmy sometimes lay awake at night wondering how he could live without this if Thomas got a proper fancy man, or found himself increasingly unenthused by the idea of chasing girls, that was no one’s business but his own.

It ended, after a fashion, when they were hungover. Jimmy unstuck his eyelids from each other reluctantly as the hallboy banged on the door. His arm was asleep. Probably due to the warm weight of not-his-bed’s other occupant who was staring at him with wide eyes.

“What are you doing here still?” Thomas hissed.

“I—” Jimmy blinked. He remembered crawling under the covers and maneuvering Thomas into place behind him like the other man was a pillow. “Ten minutes,” he’d grumbled in answer to Thomas’ reminder that he had to go sleep in his own room. He didn’t want to go. His bed was cold, and it wasn’t fair.

“Shite,” Thomas muttered, not waiting for an answer. He rolled out of bed, throwing on his underclothes and setting about shaving with almost inhuman efficiency. Jimmy would hack his face to pieces if he tried that, but he supposed necessity was the mother of invention.

Jimmy dressed in his pyjamas from last night and tried not to stare at Thomas as he got ready for the day. People were faffing about outside the door, so he didn’t dare slip out. He borrowed Thomas’ comb to at least do something about taming his hair. The other man’s pomade was foreign yet wonderfully familiar, and it soothed his mute anxiety to have that scent on his body. That toothbrush in his mouth. He imagined he rather smelt like Thomas all over right now. Bloody hell.

There was a swift rap at the door.

“Mr. Barrow?” came Carson’s imperious baritone. 

Thomas shoved him into the open wardrobe. “Stay here and don’t move. I’ll be right back,” he whispered. He closed the door and Jimmy was in darkness.

“Yes, Mr. Carson?”

“Do you have any idea where James might be?”

“How should I know? I just got up.” Thomas lied so smoothly to other people. He never lied like that with Jimmy, he couldn’t. It was comical when he tried. Jimmy found himself smiling there in the wardrobe, despite his hammering heart.

Carson harrumphed. “With me, if you please, Mr. Barrow.”

Jimmy could sense the ‘I don’t please’ that Thomas bit back as clearly as if he had said it aloud. The door shut and Jimmy was left straining to decipher Carson’s drone as it carried on down the hallway. People were still walking around outside; he would have to wait until everyone went down.

He wasn’t sure why he stayed in the wardrobe. The likelihood of anyone coming into Thomas’ room was minimal, and he found that he wasn’t nearly as scared about the whole thing as he ought to be. He was more angry than anything else. Angry at Carson for dragging Thomas off to do some made-up task, angry at their jobs for requiring that they live in a bloody dormitory like monks and sleep on uncomfortable tiny beds, angry at the world for not leaving them alone. They ought to leave. They could go to York or someplace and find better jobs. They could share a flat. Nothing particularly unusual about two bachelors sharing a flat, people did that all the time. Thomas could have all the clocks he wanted. Jimmy could save up for a piano. They could get a pet and only have to share a bathroom with each other and go at it whenever they wanted—

Jimmy realized that he had been petting the lapel of Thomas’ suit. The jacket smelt almost as much like him as Jimmy did, of smoke and pomade and fresh linen. Jimmy was hunched in a wardrobe because he had almost been caught in a compromising position with a man, sniffing and fondling said man’s clothing, and daydreaming about running away with that very same man. Reality was staring at Jimmy in the dark of the wardrobe, and he didn’t like it at all. He was in love with Thomas bloody Barrow. No girl was going to come along. Nothing was going to change. He was a great lavender hypocrite.

He had always known, in a way. From before he even began their little arrangement. But there had always been a way to keep it at arm’s length, even if his attempts to do so verged on comical in hindsight. Normal men didn’t sleep with their queer best friends. Normal men probably didn’t _have_ queer best friends. Which was horribly sad, now that he thought on it. Thomas ought to be able to have mates who were just that. Hell, _Jimmy_ wanted mates who were just that. Because Thomas wasn’t just a mate. He was so much more than that.

“We should run away,” he said when Thomas slipped back into the room.

“Right now?”

“No, but we should.”

Thomas rolled his eyes. “Well in the meantime could you go get dressed before we’re both sacked?”

“Thomas.”

“What?”

“I mean it. Run away with me.” He curled his hands into Thomas’ lapels. He needed him to understand. “We could go off and have a flat and do as we please.”

“Don’t you think that’s takin’…whatever this is…a bit far?” There was no mistaking the hope in his voice. Guilt twisted in Jimmy’s stomach. He had some making up to do. He snaked his arms around Thomas’ middle and pressed his face into his shoulder, careful not to muss the under-butler’s livery.

“I think I’m done pretendin’.”

“Well thank Christ for that,” Thomas muttered, trying valiantly for his annoyed-under-butler-voice through a mile-wide grin. “Now get dressed, you nutter.”

**Author's Note:**

> Is this whole story a set-up for a closet joke? Maybe. Am I sorry? Nope.


End file.
